Swimming Easy in the Deep

ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE - THE LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

The Holy Grail for scientists is finding a single theory of life and everything; one organising insight that will explain how the universe works in all its multifarious manifestations.

This scientific obsession is driven by the delusion that humans must, by definition, be able to explain everything in terms that they find satisfying and acceptable. Yeah, right … explain why beautiful women so often marry dog-ugly men, why you can’t unlearn how to ride a bicycle (try it sometime), or why a toothache disappears in the dentist’s waiting room ….

The irony is that while we hate to admit it, we actually know that we know very little and much of the angst and most of the Counselling industry that typify our age is driven by a denial of this understanding.

We have conned ourselves into assuming that we live in a world that works by logical, human-friendly rules and as the evidence mounts that this is clearly not the case more people become more confused and more frightened every day.

It is precisely because we are kidding ourselves that we struggle.

Once we accept that while there may be lots of little rules that work some of the time (like gravity, physics and the inverse correlation between how bad medicine tastes and how good it is for you) the universe reveals an obtuse logic, a single, all-encompassing law that applies to everything and everybody, always.

Had we been at the creational take-away counter this is probably not what we might have ordered but it’s a lot more fun than the bland “meat and 2 veg” alternative we would probably have signed up for. 

Whether we like it or not, we live in a vastly complex universe in which everything is interconnected and where what happens is entirely independent of what we may want. As Lynne McTaggart demonstrates in “The Intention Experiment” we cause things to happen way beyond our understanding and reach all the time.

There are only two ways to respond to this realisation: denial or acceptance.

It is only once we accept that we are largely clueless and probably not in control of anything that it becomes possible to see that our universe and everything and everybody in it actually is governed by a single all-encompassing law albeit one many of us don’t necessarily like:

The law of unintended consequences (LUC for short) which holds that for every intended consequence there is an equal and opposite set of unintended consequences.

The “Law of Unintended Consequences” is not something I thought out. It has been the subject of philosophical speculation for ages and some people have even tried their hand at reducing it to “science” (he he).

Everything I have ever managed to find about the Law of Unintended Consequences is flawed in the same way – the authors, thinkers and writers in question all seem to think that we can somehow anticipate the unintended, know the unknowable. This explains why they all limit the law to stating that intended consequences will cause unintended ones too without recording that these will always be unknowable in advance (or else they wouldn't be unintended in the first place).

Newton’s Third Law states that: "Every action has an equal and opposite reaction". Good scientist that he was, Newton and all those who followed him only gave credence to the “real” world and assumed that laws of physics can only apply in a physical world where they could be observed and measured. They were wrong.

The same law holds equally true in the invisible force-field of which we are all part. The only difference is that this invisible realm cannot be reduced to one-dimensional causal relations where the equal and opposite reaction is a simple “push-back”.

Our intentions cause vibrations throughout the infinitely large spider’s web that is the universe (or if you prefer, cause ripples across the lake of infinity) where they meet up with the vibrations or ripples of untold numbers of other intentions. In symbiotic resonance they compose a flawless unique and original part for the symphony of life every moment of every day.  How the universe responds we can never know in advance.   What we do know and should never forget is that it will respond.  Always has, always will.

Scary? Not at all! There are theorems that qualify the Law of Unintended Consequences and the most important of them all is that the universe works to encourage what is good and discourage what is bad. If we insist on joy in spite of everything, we will find it and cause it.

In the words of John Lennon in “All you need is love”:

There's nothing you can do that can't be done.

Nothing you can sing that can't be sung.

Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game.

It's easy.

 

Nothing you can make that can't be made.

No one you can save that can't be saved.

Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you in time.

It's easy.

…

All you need is love.

…

Love is all you need.

 

Nothing you can know that isn't known.

Nothing you can see that isn't shown.

Nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be.

It's easy.

 

All you need is love.

…

Love is all you need.

THE SECRET TO SUCCESS: POSE AND SUBSTANCE

Life comprises two elements:

• Pose; and
• Substance

To succeed at anything you need both and progress requires you to adopt the pose until – or even in the hope or expectation – that the substance develops.

The logic is really quite simple:

• Unless you look the part you are never going to play the part; and
• There’s no use in looking under “L” for Landing in the Idiots Guide to Flying when you’re about to touch down.

 If all you have is pose your deception will be exposed sooner rather than later. If all you have is substance nobody is going to believe you and you are likely to end up on the sidelines somewhere.

 We all pose. More often than most of us would like to believe. Most often with no idea where the substance will come from. All we can do is trust the universe to deliver … and it usually does.

Ironically pose is not something that is adopted just for the benefit of others, so that we will look right to them, but as importantly so we will look right to ourselves. Our subconscious is a fickle and peculiar thing. It will kick into action to flesh out a new pose at the drop of a hat but will slumber in the background in the absence of one.

This notion of “pose and substance” has an interesting footnote. 

We have been taught to believe that there are only three kinds of knowledge:

• What we know we know;
• What we know we don’t know; and
• What we don’t know we don’t know.

While this may be scientifically accurate in the sense that it can be proven, life isn’t always scientific. At some point in our lives, with some more often than others, everybody finds themselves knowing how to act in a completely new situation, something they had never dreamt of having to do. How does that work?

While scientists may not like it, there is a fourth kind of knowledge: What we don’t know we know.

Those among us who are more easily more willing to adopt a challenging pose are usually also those who most readily accept that we can tap into a universal source of knowledge in ways we may not be able to explain or understand but which is there if we expect it to be. Some people accept this consciously and are able to use it at will. Most, however, only discover or use this parachute of knowledge when they are in unexpected crisis … and then end up believing it was dumb luck. More’s the pity!  

CRAZY WISDOM: ROBBINS SAYS IT BEST

The aim of Swimming Easy in the Deep is to be a serious bit of fun that nudges readers into smiling at life so that they can experience the joy of receiving a celestial grin in return. 

Which is easier said than done and I must confess to finding it really hard to be light-hearted all the time and have ended up writing posts that are longer than intended, more cerebral than they should be and about as funny as a utility account.  It seems I am struggling to escape the ubiquitous subconscious suburban conviction that light-hearted must be light-weight.

So it was with some relief that I came across a new interview with Tom Robbins on the meaning of Crazy Wisdom and how it works.  Robbins starts all his novels with a single "perfect" sentence and then completes them one sentence at a time trusting the universe to lead him from the one full-stop (period if you are in the States) to the next until he gets to the last one.  Apart from being really funny and having an organic - some would say orgasmic - resonance with the vagaries of a universe that defies the vanity of our collective delusions of order, he writes extremely well and has a turn of phrase that few can equal.  A quote from Still Life With Woodpecker will suffice:  "Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature".


One day maybe I will be able to write blog posts as prescient as this excerpt from an interview with Tom Robbins called "Wisdom of the Rebels" in the July issue of Shambhala Sun:

   

Shambhala Sun: How would you define crazy wisdom?

Tom Robbins: The quick and easy answer is that crazy wisdom is the deliberate opposite of conventional wisdom. Like most quick and easy answers, however, that one isn't really satisfying.

For want of a precise definition, we might consider that crazy wisdom is a philosophical worldview that recommends swimming against the tide, cheerfully seizing the short end of the stick, embracing insecurity, honoring paradox, courting the unexpected, celebrating the unfamiliar, shunning each and every orthodoxy, volunteering for those tasks nobody else wants or dares to do, and perhaps above all else, breaking taboos in order to destroy their power. It's the wisdom of those who turn the tables on despair by lampooning it, and who neither seek authority nor submit to it.

What's the point of all this? To enlarge the soul, light up the brain, and liberate the spirit. Crazy wisdom is both transformative and transcendent.

WHERE YOU STAND DEPENDS ON WHERE YOU SIT

There is much ongoing debate in Prince Albert where we live about whether to allow the golf course to be shifted and upgraded as part of a much larger initiative that would open up space for a middle-class suburb which is sorely needed by especially those folks who have outgrown the historically Coloured township, establish a housing node outside the historical core of the town and mean that there is something more closely approximating a golf course than the present bare Karoo scrub with 9 holes scattered around it.

In a town as small as this it is inevitable that emotions run high whenever any kind of change is mooted and it is encouraging that there are so many people interested in what happens.

It is also hardly a surprise that there is a stark dividing line between those who support the project and those who oppose it.  Those who support the project are generally those who experience the town as a working town where they are trying to improve their lives and build themselves a future.  Those opposed tend to be more recent arrivals who moved here because it is a small town and are afraid that it could lose its charm and appeal if it grows any further.

Which reminds me of the old truism that: "Where you stand depends on where you sit".  This insight is claimed as original by Rufus E Miles Jr. who was an assistant secretary to various American Presidents but it is probably as old as the study of human behaviour itself - and remains as valid today as it was then.

I can (and probably will) devote a separate blog to the fact that life is lived from the inside out ... always ... by everybody.  Fact is that everything we see or do takes who, what and where we are as its point of departure.  Whether it be consciously or subconsciously we are all trying to get or be somewhere even if that somewhere is staying exactly where we are. 

The problem, of course, is that our lives constantly intersect with the paths of others who seem intent on getting somewhere else.  It is normal to resist being taken somewhere else, to somewhere we don't  want to be so we end up in a never-ending struggle to impose our path of choice.

There are two problems with this struggle:

• While the routes may be different, the destination is surprisingly often the same; and
• The fact that you path crosses mine doesn't necessarily mean that they need to share more than the crossing.

Unless we are able to understand where the "other" person is sitting we can never even begin to understand why they take a particular stand.  It is only once we are able to understand where they are coming from that we can either live with their intentions or figure out how to challenge them.

There are very few clear-cut "either/or" situations in which there is room for only one point of view.  If we stop being so attached to what we think we know to be be true and allowed ourselves the luxury of an open mind every now and then we would be pleasantly surprised at how often we can live with (and prosper as a result of) a change of mind.

Which is easier said than done.  As I pointed out the other day, Krishnamurti was spot on when he referred to the tyranny of the known.  What we think we know already is a tyrant that governs with an iron fist.

THE HARDEST THING TO LEARN

Krishnamurti is not as well known in the West as he should be.

A gentle and humble man he was born in India in 1895 and unusually for the time raised within the Theosophical Society. In 1929 Krishnamurti repudiated all connections with organized religions and ideology. He accepted no fees for his talks, no royalties on his books and recordings and used to sit under a large tree holding discussions with visitors. Jiddu Krishnamurti died in1986.

There are many websites devoted to Krishnamurti and his teachings and his works which have now been translated into forty-seven languages, including Swahili and Afrikaans attracted a wide range of people including George Bernard Shaw, Greta Garbo, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, Joseph Campbell, Albert Einstein, Alan Watts, Jackson Pollock, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Christopher Isherwood and Charlie Chaplin.

If there is a central teaching by Krishnamurti that has most influenced my own way of thinking it is the insight that the hardest thing to learn is something you think you already know.

The problem is, as he understood and explained, that we are all burdened with a lifetime of knowledge, things we have been taught, learnt, felt and experienced and that we define ourselves and engage with the world by relying on what we think we know instead of doing so with open minds.

As a result we are all victims of the tyranny of the known and are condemned to making the same mistakes over and over.

This is not just a philosophical abstraction. Many if not most of the most dazzling discoveries in any field are made by mavericks or newcomers; those who do not accept or play by the proverbial rules of the game.

In a sense by sticking to what we know we become sets of answers looking for problems and life becomes a lot like a paint-by-numbers picture. There are no paint-by-numbers pictures in the National Gallery and it is no surprise that our paint-by-numbers approach to life doesn't work!

THE MOST INCONVENIENT TRUTH

Scientists struggle with the reality that everything in our universe is connected to everything else and that nothing happens in isolation.  If there is a single scientific organising theory of everything we haven't figured it out yet so they have to limit themselves to just a tiny fragment of this greater whole and trust that whatever they find fits into the bigger picture beyond their world and their work.

This "polony slice" approach to science in which we isolate bits of reality has served us well and helped us cure polio and the pox and led to the invention of the wheel and bubblegum.  It also poses one of the biggest threats to happiness we humans are ever likely to encounter during our sojourn in this universe.

It doesn't take a genius to understand that global warming and poverty are  two  of the most pressing issues of our time.  Wherever one looks there are reports on the cataclysmic consequences of ever more people more poor and more wretched in more places than ever before and aberrant weather patterns.  Desperate photographs of skeletal waifs compete for prominence with panoramic vistas of flood damage and endemic drought.

Despite all the hype, the Nobel Peace Prizes and the celebrity concerts with which we assuage our collective conscience, the problems just seem to get worse.  The drive to use bio-fuels exacerbates an already acute food shortage.  Famine and political instability in much of the Third World puts entire populations beyond the reach of relief aid.

It is commendable that modern-day crusaders are willing to gird their loins and do battle with the demons of climate change and hunger.  In supporting their efforts we all feel as if we are helping to make the world a better place.

But are we?  I'm not sure.   

We are so caught up in the drama of it all that there is a single, simple, most inconvenient truth that we collectively ignore(probably because it is too dreadful to contemplate) and it is this:

Beating poverty means keeping more people alive for longer.  Keeping more people alive for longer means massive relief oriented spending and consumption.  All of which means an exponential increase in all the processes that drive global warming.  Put differently, to beat poverty we may need to fry the world.  Or, if your preference is environmental: To reverse global warming we need fewer people.

Think about it: Relieving poverty means that we have to provide the poor with proper housing, sanitation, health care, food and education.  This can only be achieved through a massive increase in the construction of everything from roads to power stations to houses and a similar increase in the production of everything from nails to diapers.  As more people survive and prosper there will be an inevitable exponentially growing demand for shoes, for sanitary pads, for electricity, for fridges, for transport, for entertainment. 

If we ignore this demand people will stay poor and wretched.  If we meet it there will be more greenhouse gases than ever.

Does this mean that we have to let some people die so that the rest of us will be better off?    Or that we can ignore the devastation we wreak on our planet?

I think not although I also think we are not too far away from fundamentalist groups advocating these kinds of "solutions".

What I do know is that how we respond to this dilemma will determine the future.

As I see it, evolution doesn't make mistakes (which is just another way of saying that where we are at any given time is exactly where we should be).  Whatever we do, the sun will still rise in the mornings and set in the evenings, the universe will carry on as it always has.  We may not always like what the universe delivers but it will always deliver.

It would be nice for us to know all the answers but we don't.  All we can and must do is to have faith in the universe to encourage what is good and discourage what is bad and our individual and collective ability to tap into that universal power for good ... and then do our best.

If our intentions are good then, even if we have no idea right now of how we will meet the competing and seemingly irreconcilable challenges of poverty and global warming, the universe will respond by guiding us to a solution. 

If we are more concerned with looking and sounding right than being right the universe will expose our deception.

On an individual level the only appropriate response to the challenges we face is to be gentle in our interaction with other people, especially the poor, and gentle in our engagement with the environment.

And to smile.

Insist on joy in spite of everything.  If you think this is bad or that the challenges we face are unfair imagine how that first tadpole-like thingy must have felt as it crawled out of the ocean to spawn all the creatures of the earth ....

THE SCARCITY OF SCARCITY

Remember when you used to look forward to going to the movies or when having an ice cream was a treat?

Ever wonder why many of us look back with longing at the “bad” old days when we had so much less?

Most of us believe that life comprises two elements: the ordinary and the exceptional and that our lives are defined by the exceptional things that happen to us.

For something to be exceptional it must be rare or scarce. Whether it is something nice or something bad doesn’t really matter as long as it doesn’t happen often.

In our minds we set up a scale to see whether the good stuff outweighs the bad stuff. Which is all very well except we keep making the mistake of believing that the more we have of a good thing, the better it will be.

Imagine for a moment if every one of us could sing beautifully, everybody would sound the same; if all women were equally pretty, they would all look the same; if everybody could run equally quickly, there would be no point in holding the Olympics. The same holds true for more everyday things like ice cream, clothes and movies.

We all learn that the ordinary is never exceptional but the exceptional can become very ordinary very quickly and most of us fall into the trap of trying to stay ahead of this inevitability.

The result is that the better off we get the unhappier we become – the exceptional is always something we are chasing. The only thing that is increasingly scarce is scarcity itself and that gets harder to find all the time.

The culture of entitlement that drives our spending lies at the heart of this dilemma. We have grown to expect only the best all the time. Getting what we want has become ordinary; not getting it, exceptional.

All of which is just another example of how our values have gone crazy.

Instead of celebrating the abundance we mourn not having more. Instead of making peace with who we are, where we are and what we have, we are driven to be someone else, be somewhere else and to have more stuff.

To fix this we need to realise two things:

• happiness is not a destination or a commodity, it is a state of mind; and
•  scarcity is a matter of opinion.

Buying something, getting something or going somewhere will never make you happy unless you want to be. Being unhappy is the easiest thing on earth, whether you get what you want or not.  If you decide to be unhappy, you will be.

What makes something special? Lots of things can help to make something special but ultimately it is only special if you decide it is. If you decide something is ordinary then, no matter what else, it will never be special. Conversely, you can decide that something which most people would be consider to be very ordinary is exceptional and it will be so, no matter what anybody else may think.

 

This is a profound insight and one that can change your life if you take it on board but it is easier said than done and most people find it incredibly hard to go from learning to doing.

Here are a few tips:

• Live in the moment. Really focus on the right now. You can’t change what is past and can’t know what lies ahead.
• Immerse yourself in the immediate sensation. Is this good? Is this bad? Bad has its purpose too. You won’t know what’s good if you never taste bad and most of the bad stuff passes quite quickly anyway.
• Give thanks for the good, accept the ordinary and ask mercy for the bad. By consciously labelling your response you will realise that even if you eat ice cream every day it stays special.

The irony of this approach is that as you become more conscious of how you feel right now, as you learn to savour your blessings as you receive them no matter how small, you will discover that the ordinary can be quite nice too.

Decide to be happy and you can be  ... most of the time ... promise.  Try it, it works.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN KICKING A BALL AND KICKING A DOG

I read this somewhere when I was still teaching at university and wish I could remember who the author was because it has stayed with me always.

    When you kick a ball, the reaction is in the kick. 

    When you kick a dog, the reaction is in the dog.

A ball is an inanimate object and will do what you intend it to do.  A dog is not and it is just as likely to run away with its tail between its legs as it is to bite you in the butt.

The next time you want to kick someone - and even more so when next you get kicked - remember this:  You own your reaction and you control how you respond. 

Challenges look very different once you realise you can choose how to respond.

SWIMMING EASY IN THE DEEP: QUE SERA SERA

Most people think that life was once simple but has become complicated and a lot faster since the advent of mass media and the internet. They are wrong on both counts.

To begin with, life still happens one second, one hour and one day at a time. It always has and always will. As we become older each year is a slightly smaller part of our lives so far with the result that succeeding years may seem to pass faster and faster but this acceleration is an illusion. 

It is also a myth that life was once simple. Life has always been complicated beyond belief and understanding with an infinite number of possibilities facing each and every person every day. Think about it. 

As we have seen, life works a lot like racing along a busy freeway while all you can see is the rear-view mirror. Add to this that none of us can really know (as opposed to believe that we know) where we come from, where we are going or why and you have a recipe for calamitous confusion. Or do you?

The secret to life and all human success, happiness and contentment is what Tom Robbins calls the ability to “Swim Easy in the Deep” and it is to him and all the others who insist on joy in spite of everything that this Blog is dedicated. 

It goes without saying that when you actually do swim in deep waters, especially in the sea, you have no idea what is going on below you. There are two ways to respond to not knowing: you can panic and try to get out as quickly as you can, or you can relax and enjoy the moment.

Most people prefer being in shallow water or on firm ground because they feel safer there. There is just one slight problem with this belief: it is dead wrong. They are just as likely to be happy and safe in the unknown as they are to be struck by lightning, a bus or another form of catastrophe on terra firma. In fact, whether they are at home, at work or at play nobody, but nobody knows what will happen next … or even whether there will be a next.

Human beings have known this forever but our generation has chosen to pretend it isn’t true and we are already paying a massive price for this pretence. 

Now that mass media, TV and particularly the internet has made it possible for all of us to access every word ever written on every subject imaginable and we have split the atom, beaten the bad guys, put people on the moon and transplanted hearts and lungs amongst other things we would like to think that we know it all – and if not “all”, at least enough to be in charge of our own destiny.

Ironically, the self-same mass media, TV and internet that convinces us that we are in charge is also at the root of that nagging suspicion that keeps growing larger that we are not in control at all, that we are very much at the mercy of the universe and that we are hopelessly inadequate. Wherever we look we see evidence that all is not as it should be.

In the past people accepted without question that you needed to know something to know something and that most often you knew enough. 

In the age of wall-to-wall digital media we are confronted with so much knowledge that we cannot possibly know it all so we rely on experts to tell us what matters and what doesn’t. Somewhere along the way we allowed ourselves to be conned into believing that we need to know everything to know anything which makes us incurably inadequate and utterly dependent on others to cope.

There are many people who thrive on this nonsense. A whole industry has developed around SHAM (the Self-Help and Actualisation Movement – not original but really clever) to keep people believing they are inadequate, to set them up for even greater “failure” and to earn obscene amounts of money. Steve Salerno has written a scathing indictment of this situation in his book: “SHAM: How the gurus of the self-help movement make us helpless”. It is well worth reading.

Other industries promote lifestyles that are unattainable and manage to sell useless garbage to an unsuspecting public that is by now so confused that it will buy anything. People are so caught up in the belief that they can’t know right from wrong, necessary from unnecessary that it is not inconceivable that they would gladly invest in virtual toilet paper, but more on that topic in a later post.

So, how did people survive in earlier times and how can some people swim easy in the deep?

Simple really: Shut out the noise. Confused? Let me explain using a simple example.

Just about everybody can make a seriously good cup of coffee and that to do so you need to know:

o Where the coffee goes;

o Where the water goes;

o Where the cup goes;

o Where to switch the thing on; and

o Which button to press.

You really – and I mean really – don’t have to know anything about:

o Electricity generation and distribution;

o Appliance and component manufacturing;

o Which bugs attack coffee plantations and how to manage them;

o How to design, make, fire, market and sell cutlery or crockery; or even

o Where the water in the tap comes from.

 Most things are like that: driving a car, using a computer, getting laid and raising children. You need to do what you need to do; no more and no less.

 If you had to figure out everything about everything you do or want to do you would never get out of bed – assuming you got into it in the first place. 

 And, surprise!, most of the time none of us is at all frightened by not knowing what lies behind or beneath what we are doing.

 We all swim easy in the deep most of the time anyway. But just like a child who discovers that it shouldn’t be able to float, when we realise what we are doing, we sink like a stone. Changing that is not as difficult as you may think.

 In 1956 Doris Day had a huge hit with the song “Que Sera Sera” from the movie “The Man Who Knew Too Much”.   I wonder whether Ray Evans knew just how profound they were when he penned the following seemingly corny and sentimental words? Everybody over 50 is forgiven for humming along as they read the lyrics.

 
"QUE SERA, SERA"

from THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1956)

words by Ray Evans and music by Jay Livingston

 

When I was just a little girl

I asked my mother

What will I be?

Will I be pretty?

Will I be rich?

Here's what she said to me:

 

Que sera, sera.

Whatever will be, will be.

The future's not ours to see.

Que sera, sera.

What will be, will be.

 

When I grew up and fell in love

I asked my sweetheart

What lies ahead?

Will we have rainbows

Day after day?

Here's what my sweetheart said:

 

Que sera, sera.

Whatever will be, will be.

The future's not ours to see.

Que sera, sera.

What will be, will be.

 

Now I have children of my own.

They ask their mother,

What will I be?

Will I be handsome?

Will I be rich?

I tell them tenderly:

 

Que sera, sera.

Whatever will be, will be.

The future's not ours to see.

Que sera, sera.

What will be, will be.

Que sera, sera.

 

THE GOOF’S GUIDE TO LIFE AND EVERYTHING ELSE

We live in an age of instant gratification, an age where we can buy solutions to just about everything over a counter somewhere. Stupid or vain enough to believe we know everything our generation expects that to be true for life and everything else too. It isn’t.

Life happens in ways we can never fully understand or ever anticipate. To quote Kierkegaard again: “Life has its own hidden forces which you can only discover by living”.

As has been shown many times over we live in an interconnected world where everything, even our thoughts form part of the same energy. We find peace when we find resonance with this power of the universe and we get there when we realise that even though we can never know everything, we already know enough.

The most difficult thing about making peace with life (which is not the same as solving all of life’s problems) is figuring out how easy it is. Since time immemorial successive generations have survived and flourished despite seemingly knowing much less than we do.

How did they do it? The answer is quite simple: They knew and accepted some things to be true even if they had no way of proving them and knew nonsense when they saw it. Unlike our generation which needs external assistance to for even the smallest decision or challenge, they reached these conclusions for themselves.

The irony is that in replacing received wisdom with an insistence on scientific rigour we have declared much of what we know to be true to be wrong or problematic not because we don’t know it to be so but because we can’t prove it to our own satisfaction – and are already paying a terrible price for this vanity. We have decreased, not increased, our knowledge.

But it isn’t all bad news. On the contrary, once you accept that you have sufficient sense to figure out how to put one proverbial foot in front of the other, one thing leads to another and before you know it, you have a set of rules you can live by quite happily irrespective of who, where or what you are.

 

Over the years I have developed the following understanding for myself:

Rule 1:

• The universe is governed by rules that encourage what is good and discourage what is bad. This understanding lies at the heart of all religions and all spiritual schools of thought even if they get most of the rest wrong.

Rule 2:

• These rules are way too complex for us to understand completely but we don’t need to as long as we remember that:

 

• Everyone and everything is connected to everyone and everything else. Nothing happens without it affecting everything somehow. Sometimes the flutter of butterfly wings on one side of the universe may well cause tidal waves on the other. It could just as easily calm them. We may intend particular consequences but for every set of intended consequences there is an equal and opposite set of unintended consequences – you intend someone harm but end up hurting yourself more; the less you ask, the more you get. And it doesn’t help to try and manage these unintended consequences because all that does is to extend the consequential matrix of ripples ever further and ever wider.

 

• Life happens; it isn't scripted or choreographed and it certainly can’t be blamed on you, God or anyone else. Once we accept this it becomes a lot less scary.

 

• You can't change what is past and can't know what lies ahead.

 

• All you have is right now. If you can stop for the moment and think it through you will realise that you can engage with right now without looking backwards or forward.  Once you become more acutely aware of your immediate surroundings (what it looks, sounds, smells and       feels like) and concentrate on what you are actually doing instead of why, you go into a zone where nothing else matters which is as it should be.

 

• We control our thoughts, not the other way around, but we can and often don't realise or do this.  If we are able to separate thought from reality half the battle is won.

 

• Even if it is not  pre-ordained all loss, all suffering and all joy have meaning in the       sense that they change the way the world and the universe work. 

 

• We will never know why things happen to specific people.  This, I think, is not because there is a hidden reason behind horrible things that will one day be revealed to us but because there is no reason as such other than that it happened.       

 

• Whether we are Christians, Muslims, or whatever, we are born from a single source of energy that defies our understanding and we will all become part of that energy when we die.  It makes no sense for God to have favourites or for us all to be captive to the geography of our birth.  Either we all come from the same       power or we don't.  How we will meet up again I really don't know but I am certain that we will all end up in the same "place" or "space" and that how that happens and works will make sense there even if it doesn't do so here.

 

• Our single biggest talent / survival mechanism is the ability to insist on joy in spite of       everything.  This doesn't mean going into denial but simply insisting on focusing on what is joyful in even the most desperate of circumstances.  There are many, many examples of laughter in the face of adversity and it is one of the miracles of life that if you can find the strength to smile at it, life tends to smile back. 

 

• The universe metes out its own justice.  Somehow, somewhere, the universe gets even by repaying kind in kind.  Good turns are returned, bad ones remembered.  If we immerse ourselves in negative energy that is all the universe has to respond to.  As soon as we are able to let go of "hard" feelings which is easier said than done, the universe softens its approach to us.

 

Call this a Goof’s Guide to life and everything else if you will, but it works – always, everywhere, for everyone.